The known motor vehicle lock (DE 102 58 645 B4), on which the invention is based, has a motor vehicle lock with the locking elements of a lock catch and a pawl. In the usual way, the pawl can be moved into an open position, into a main locked position and into a pre-locked position. Here, the pawl performs the task of holding the lock catch in the two locked positions. To release the lock catch, the pawl must be manually raised.
In the known motor vehicle lock, the manual raising of the pawl is provided within the context of the realization of a mechanical redundancy. This means that the pawl is normally raised by means of a motor, and is manually raised only in an emergency situation, for example in the event of a power failure.
The known motor vehicle lock is also equipped with a lock mechanism which can be switched into different functional states. These are the functional states “unlocked”, “locked”, “anti-theft locked” and “child-safety locked”. In the “unlocked” functional state, the associated motor vehicle door can be opened by actuating the door inner handle and the door outer handle. In the “locked” functional state, opening cannot be carried out from the outside but can be carried out from the inside. In the functional state “anti-theft locked”, opening can be carried out neither from the outside nor from the inside. In the “child-safety locked” state, opening can be carried out from the outside, but not from the inside.
It is now conventionally the case that the door outer handle is coupled to an outer actuating lever and the door inner handle is coupled to an inner actuating lever, with the two actuating levers being coupled to or decoupled from the pawl depending on the functional state. For this purpose, the lock mechanism is equipped with a coupling arrangement in which a coupling peg interacts with different control slots. Such a realization of the above coupling function is mechanically cumbersome since the adjustability of the coupling peg is always associated with the use of corresponding bearing and guide elements.